Zadie Smith
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.Collection: Stories
(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)Collection: Giving
It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.Collection: Rights
The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.Collection: Simple
Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.Collection: Energy
I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.Collection: Men
The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.Collection: Cynical
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.Collection: Laughing
You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.Collection: Land
Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.Collection: Past
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.Collection: People
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.Collection: Skins
I guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.Collection: Essence
You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.Collection: Strong
When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, "Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure."Collection: Pain
To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.Collection: Keys
Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.Collection: Football
I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.Collection: Believe
It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.Collection: Bags
It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.Collection: Home
And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.Collection: Writing
It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.Collection: Self
He traced the genealogy of the feeling.Collection: Feelings
They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.Collection: Weed
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.Collection: Children
The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.Collection: Men
When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.Collection: People
The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.Collection: Sleep
Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.Collection: Wise
It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophyCollection: Philosophy
Each couple is its own vaudeville act.Collection: Couple
Full stories are as rare as honesty.Collection: Honesty
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.Collection: Divorce
First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.Collection: Children
To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.Collection: Children
This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give.Collection: Blow
When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.Collection: Writing
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.Collection: Pain
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.Collection: Approval
The really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in north London and rarely leaves it... Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England - but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury.Collection: Men
It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.Collection: Ideas
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.Collection: Would Be
13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.Collection: Weight Problems
The nineties, ecstatic decade!Collection: Ecstatic
I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.Collection: Ideas
I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.Collection: Fun
The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.Collection: Caring
I was brought up with the sense that I was absolutely no different from my brothers. I went to college thinking I was absolutely no different from the men in college. But that's not true. I'm fundamentally different. The problem was not being able to understand difference and equality at the same time. It's something that we can't seem to comprehend. You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. It's a mistake.Collection: Brother
She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.Collection: Women